March 2003 Archives

At long last - I have finished updating the CD collection. Pretty much. All the CDs are these, and the existing comments are there. I still need to go through and write many, many comments, but I figure if I do a couple a day for about 6 months then eventually...

I have also decided that I am going to clean up the program that I used to create the pages and release it for others to use. It's basically a simple database and an engine for generating the HTML pages from templates.

This one is for you Mikey.

An article on msnbc about support for the war amuses me. Specifically:

"Bush’s approval rating of 67 percent in the poll of 516 adults conducted Sunday was up from 62 percent on March 17, two days before the first air strikes against Iraq. The percentage of Americans who disapprove of Bush’s job performance also declined by 5 percent, from 33 percent to 28 percent, over the period."

What perception! According to this analysis, the percentage of people who don't think Bush is doing a good job DECREASED by exactly the same percentage that his approval rating INCREASED! Wow! That's an amazing analysis of the situation!

I'm going to go cry for the loss of american journalism now.

D-F is up. I rule!!!!!

But I just finished writing the software do-hickey that will automatically create pages for my CD collection! Needless to say I am psyched. As soon as I take care of a database issue or two the whole thing will go up.

Hooray!

Now back to your regularly scheduled bleakness.

The U.S. has begun it's "Shock and Awe" attack on Baghdad. Seems that the point is not to blow things up - we're blowing stuff up, but it's not the point. The point is to scare everybody in Iraq. Apparently if you are a superpower, using terror as a weapon is okay-fine.

What I am still waiting (hoping?) for is the explanation for all of this. Why have we gone to war - I mean really why. Even the Bush junta has never been able to make up its mind or give us a good lie. First it was regime change, then it was disarming, then it was liberating the Iraqs, then it was regime change again. None of these ever seemed genuine and I'm wondering how long it's going to be before it's possible to look back and say "Ah! That's what they were up to!"

The snow is over, and everyone survived. Everything is still white, and the streets are still hazardous, but by then end of the day everything should be back to normal. Much excitement this morning when I was driving into work. About 1/4 of a mile from work there is a tight curve, and I made the mistake of taking it at 4 MPH, causing me to slide off the road - in slow motion - into a drift of snow about 4 feet high.

I couldn't get the car out and had to abandon it for a couple of hours. When I went back everything had melted enough that I could just back out. It was interesting though, sitting there as the car slid, excurciatingly slowly across the road. I wasn't in any danger or anything - it was just - weird.

It also looks like we are at war now. There are parallels to my loss of control here. For months we have been on a long, slow, seemingly inevitable slide into war. Hopefully it will end as safely and easily as my accident did.

I doubt it though.

The weather reports for Colorado Springs tell us that tomorrow will bring between one and three feet of snow. That's, like, 6 to 18 times as much snow as we have had on the ground at any time this year.

I think that I will see if I can rent Cannibal: The Musical! in case we get snowed in...

Yesterday we watched the last 20 minutes or so of the original Planet of the Apes on T.V., and we noticed that the location of the sunken Statue of Liberty is completely wrong - even if there had been huge geological changes from a war.

I now believe that the movie is even more prescient than previously believed. (I already believe that Apes have taken over the world, you see...)

Here is the theory...

In real life, I am a relatively funny guy. It's one of the things that people notice about me. Frequently, when I am a topic of conversation, someone will say "He's funny", "He has a good sense of humor", or "Hey! Let's talk about something else". Many of the comments in my CD Collection, for example, are quite funny.

I would like for that humor to carry over into my blog, but it doesn't seem to be happening. Everything I want to write about just seems so depressing, or so important that I can't see the humor in it. Between having our civil liberties stripped away by the government, and our rights as consumers stomped on by corporations (with help from the government), to slowly, inexorably easing into a neverending war without any front (how Orwellian!) very little seems funny anymore.

That really, really sucks. I should be able to laugh at all of this - it would make it more bearable - but it's just not happening.

I think that what bothers me most about our current administration is their ability to speak out of two - sometimes three - sides of their mouths at once.

Wired News: Privacy Activist Takes on Delta
Yet another crazy assault on our privacy and ability to travel without government interference has cropped up in the form of CAPPS II. Basically, you will have background check run on you before you can travel by air. This includes a credit check.

This is pointless - it's not going to do anything to improve security (Terrorist's don't have credit? Whaaaa?), and it's a huge intrusion of privacy.

Since Delta was the first company to step up and volunteer to participate, why not boycott them?

Two state lawmakers walk out during prayer by Muslim leader

First off, let's get this out of the way - these two people are stupid, and have no business creating policy.

That said...

What I want to know is, why is there a prayer everyday - or any day? What about seperation of church and state? Do they occasionally have a pagan burn some sage, or a satanist come in to ask for Lucifer's help? Is there ever a sarcastic athiest up there saying "Okay now - those of you who talk to an imaginary friend can do so for the next couple of minutes while I read the phone book out loud"?

I have NOTHING against religion, or against people worshiping whatever the heck they want - but I really don't like the idea of mixing church and state to any degree. Can't these people pray before they come into work?

If they can't have a fair. impartial "everyone get's a turn" kind of system - and they never can - they should just drop this whole thing.

This is ridiculous. Amazon now has a patent on threaded discussions about products. Huh!?! And the patent was file in 1999 at least 3 years too late, if not more. This is stupid. This is worse than the 1-click patent. Hasn't anyone ever heard of prior art?

So, for ages I have owned several domain names - generally purchased during drunken evenings of brainstorming domain names that got out of hand. Some of them a pretty cool, like piratetwins.com or frootbat.com and frootbetty.com. Others are boring and utilitarian - purchased just so that I will have them when needed - like edgore.com.

Recently, Verio, my hosting company, made it possible to point parked domains at an IP address for free (as opposed to the old $9 a month). So, I promptly pointed my addresses at shinra.com, effective like, last Sunday.

Looking at my access log today, some guy in Huston has gone to www.edgore.com, and is using WGET to download the entire site to his local drive.

Why would anyone do this?

So, I have been at my new job for 6 months now. Those of you who know me know that I went from doing cool stuff - working for Visa International, Lego, and a company called Angry Monkey to a normal IT job in the Freight industry.

Lately, I've been using my ReplayTV to record "We Are The Eighties" on VH1 Classics. Then I use DVArchive to pull the video off, edit down to just the good ones, and burn a DVD of them.

At least, that's the theory.